ABSTRACT
A gloomy room in the basement of All Souls College, Oxford, may not have seemed an auspicious setting for my first meetings with Douglas Davies in the late 1960s when we were regular participants in Bryan Wilson’s weekly seminar in the sociology of religion. But that was where I first glimpsed the distinctive approach that Douglas was starting to develop towards a study of religion drawing on social anthropology, sociology and theology. His fieldwork among Mormons in South Wales was clearly not narrowly angled towards conventional questions about rituals or social status or doctrinal beliefs. Instead, he seemed to be aiming at a more ‘synoptic’ study which combined all these questions – and many more – in a broad appreciation of what being a Mormon in Wales might mean at the individual and collective levels. This broad approach runs like a thread through the wealth of research that he has subsequently conducted at the points where anthropologists, sociologists and theologians have their most productive conversations.
